In
navigating the pathways in our lives, we all are confronted with lots of
problems to solve on a regular basis.
Problems are those situations that have to be corrected in order to make
our lives more comfortable, more functional, and more safe. In more traditional societies many problems
were conceived of as something that had to be fixed through direct engagement
involving immediate primary experience.
Without the availability of modern machines to overcome the difficulties
in problems, people had to grapple sometime with friction-filled situations
using the flowing blendable continual stimuli of technique and craftsmanship to
create solutions in societies where material tools were basic.
Of
course not all problems lend themselves to solutions with tools or
materials. Medical problems don’t always
respond to the medicines or herbs that are available. Social and political problems are too
intangible and complex to always lend themselves to basic solutions. And then there are questions about death and
the universe which lend themselves to complex but inconclusive discussions
about vacuumized entities like gods, angels, and a wealth of mythological
creatures. Finally, there are the
personal problems of psychological states: anxiety, depression, phobias,
compulsions, hallucinations, and others.
In preindustrial societies, people with mental problems were frequently
looked at as being controlled by an outside force: everything from the curse of
a sorcerer to a witch to a wandering soul to a devil. What these attempted explanations or
solutions have in common is that they aren’t based on the defined discrete
stimuli of data and statistics. They are
based on the more blurry flowing blendable continual stimuli of natural
medicines and herbs, philosophical ideas, spiritual and mythological entities
and sorcerers, witches, wandering souls, and devils. Even though the spiritual, mythological and
magical entities partly belong in a vacuumized spirit world, they are also
pretty grounded in natural organic stimuli.
All
this is in stark contrast to the preferred methods of solving problems in
modern technological society. For one
thing, the tools used to fix problems in external world reality are so
different. Electric saws, drills and
hammers, on one level, make fixing processes easier and quicker. On the other hand, they create a lot of
abrasive stimuli and abrasive friction in the form of bursts of pressure,
bursts of noise, and bursts of dust. In
other words, these modern machine tools create vacuum and tension-pocket
experiences. Then, there are all the
digitally-based machines that make and fix things through totally mediated
processes. Nowadays, it is frequently
easier and cheaper to replace something that is broken than to bother to try
and fix it. And this is because all the
digital tools we use to carry out our basic daily tasks have become so complex.
And
then there is the preferred way that we deal with thought problems today. We no longer seem to trust intuition or
philosophical abstraction so much. We
want direct physical sensory evidence for dealing with every problem. And for solutions, we prefer the approaches
of hard science: formal experimentation, logic, data, and statistics. These are kinds of knowledge that lead to
narrow shallow solutions. And this is
because these sources are all based on defined discrete entities: a piece of
hard evidence, an axiom of hard logic, a confirmed piece of data, a confirmed
statistic. There are a delimited
infinity of these defined discrete entities, which, as has been pointed out in
the past in this column, is a smaller infinity than the non-delimited infinity
of more flowing blendable continual entities like an intuition or a blurry
abstraction.
Delimited
infinities are more controllable because they deal with fewer entities. But they leave out so many different
possibilities. Not all solutions to
problems are based on hard knowledge or hard facts. Some are based on blurry intuition and blurry
abstraction. Delimited infinities of
defined discrete entities are not conducive to developing the expansive global
solutions that some kinds of problems may require. Many of the problems in modern society like
mass murders, opioid addictions, addictions to authoritarian cult figures like
Trump, propensities to suicidal tendencies just do not lend themselves to easy
explanations from defined discrete causality. The only explanations that are possible and
appropriate are based on changes in the blurry configuration of how people
experience the world. But these are not
the kinds of explanations that most people are primed to look for in modern
technological society. They want
delimited responses. They want
controllable delimited solutions.
People
today want to turn all life situations into controllable events with defined
beginnings, defined middles and defined solutions at the end. In the process of configuring life this way,
they lose the vibrancy of life experience, which is normally a part of the
solutions in more traditional pre-industrial societies. In other words, in more traditional
societies, part of the solution to a problem lies in the journey to the
solution, rather than exclusively in the endpoint or the goal. Life as a series of completed goals or
solutions is a life that is missing something very fundamental: life. It is one reason that so many people today
experience psychological problems like anxiety, depression and suicidal
tendencies. Even in their patterns of
thought, some traditional people have known that sometimes it is necessary to
surrender to a situation rather than try and control it. Not surrender in the sense of defeat, but
surrender in the sense of fully opening oneself up to experiencing
something. And then, rather than simply
using analysis, one uses intuition.
Intuition is not as controllable as analysis, but it can lead to
solutions that are just as effective in their own way. And it allows people to feel life, even as
they are trying to solve it.
(c) 2020 Laurence Mesirow
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